23 Apr Want a successful Sales career — Go & Develop Right Attitude.

I am a firm believer that people remember only stories and not management jargons when it comes to real life. During one of my recent interactions with a couple of brand & social influencers, I realized that how important Story-telling is for upcoming entrepreneurs or budding professionals.

So keeping this narrative in the background let me try to share few tips on how to be a great salesman. (As most of us would be doing our sales budgeting or forecasting for 2018).

Story:

Our parents play an important role in carving out our personality, our character, our ethos by guiding us throughout our childhood.

In our story there exists one such family comprising of our main protagonist (son) and His father. Our main protagonist /hero lived with his family among his other 5 siblings. His father worked as Electric plant supervisor, and his mother worked at a bank. His father taught him to work hard and not to be tempted by street life.

Like any other kids of his age, our main protagonist (son) also used to ask his father to buy him new toys, gifts etc; And on one such occasion his father called him and asked his son to sell his old T-shirt which he had worn only once.

Father: How much do you think this T-shirt would cost now?

Son: $1/-

Father: Good, you must go and sell it for $2.

Here comes the first tip:

a)Conceive & believe that you can do whatever tasks come your way.

Son: Ok father. I shall do it.

The little boy then took his sparingly used t-shirt and washed it with fragrant softeners, steam ironed it (made it look like new) and took it to neighborhood community market and started showing to his friends & local market customers and finally managed to sell it for $2 after 6 hours of hard work.

Son: Father, here you go. And he hands over $2 to his father.

Father goes to the cupboard and brings out brand new white shirt.

Father: Good Son, now you take this new white shirt and sell it for $200/-.

Son readily accepts the task & nods in confirmation

Son kept wondering as to why his father is doing this to him, which idiot would pay $200 for a $10 shirt, he kept exploring various possibilities, meeting local merchants but never gave up. He stumbled upon a friend who was going for a soccer match and mentioned that their favorite soccer team is playing county match.

As they say, luck favors those who strive for success with their hard work, the hero of my story (little boy) gets an idea and he requests his friend to take him along with him.

On reaching football ground, little boy somehow managed to get close to football players who were very popular. He requested those football players to autograph on his shirt.

He then took this shirt to a community market and puts the shirt on auction and to his surprise, the crowd got really interested in owning autographed shirt & that shirt was bought within 30 mins from the time it was put on auction and guess the price ….. It got whopping $2000/-.

Son (goes to his father): father take $2000/- I have accomplished the task.

Father (with tears in his eyes): Congrats son, my prayers are with you, you shall be a successful man in life one day.

Learnings from this story:

a)Conceive: Never refuse or reject any task or project. Conceive it as done. Have faith in yourself and if required, learn or acquire skills to do that task or collaborate to build teams in case of startups ventures.

So whatever the targets/budgets are assigned to you by your company, never look at the big figure rather try to conceive ways as to HOW it can be achieved rather than stating, it’s not possible.

Focus on HOW it can be achieved and not on WHY it cannot be done.

b)Believe in Yourself: If there is anyone who could do that task, is YOU only.

c)Action: Never ever Give up & Try hard every time you hit a roadblock.

Life from time to time throws challenges at us and we should face it head-on rather than giving in to those challenges.

Remember “For those who dare to dream, there is the whole new world to win”.

Hope my attempt at developing a correct sales attitude with storytelling narration would help my readers & followers in setting their targets for 2018 & same principle could also be implemented in setting our Life goals.

I wish all my readers a very happy & prosperous New Year 2018.

And do you know who this little boy was when he grew up…? He grew to become legendary Michael Jordan– the best basketball player world has ever seen.